Daily Posts. Colorful Ideas & Inspirations.

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Have you ever wondered as to the symbolism and social meanings behind their vibrantly beadwork?

"The beaded jewelry made by the Maasai women is a tradition from the Maasai tribe, located in Southern Kenya. The Maasai have been creating beaded jewelry for a very long time. It all started long before the first European contact had occurred. At the time, the tribe used natural resources to create their jewelry. Clay, wood, bone, copper and brass are just few of the materials that were used. When trade with Europeans started in the late 19th century, glass beads were suddenly available, and it is with those that the Maasai decided to continue their tradition of beaded jewels....The colors of the jewels are not only chosen because of the beautiful ensembles they make, but also for their symbolic values. Each color has a meaning that is often related to cattle. Cattle are the main food source of the Maasai and they sustain a deep connection with them. " - Discovered.us

I am really impressed that the Maasai Culture still exits in our world today. With their unwavering culturally-rich history, American culture pales in comparison with our ever-changing fashion trends and cultural whims. They definitely have a deeply rooted culture one can't help but be impressed by.

Zentangle has been trending for some years now and many people choose to "tangle" for meditation and relaxation, just as most COLOURlovers utilize the palette and pattern tools on the site as a way of relaxing and meditating.

What I see a lot on COLOURlovers.com is that many people shy far away from using Seamless Lite after dabbling for a few, deeming it way too difficult to master. Mostly, and this is just my opinion, but well mostly because they compare themselves to the crazy-good pattern designs by veteran citizens of COLOURlovers.

Here's the news people... yes, yes these kind-hearted artists are totally talented. But did it just happen that they opened up Seamless Lite and were Michelangelo in a day? No, of course not! So you'd be silly to think,"I'm Presto Perfect!" after 5-minutes or even 5-hours fiddling with Seamless Lite.

Seamless is simple and to the point, not to mention it comes with an entire supportive and artistic community you can share your work with.

Remember, Zentangle is a personal art form. It does not have to be perfect. While you can achieve a more precise line-work by using this digital method of Seamless Lite, Zentangle is traditionally a hand-drawn technique, so take that in to consideration before you go all OCD on connecting points, center points and alignment.

Let's get started with making a shape, something short and easy... then I will be going over using a grid to help you get a sense of space, alignment and design direction with your templates.... then we will continue to work on shapes and more.

Create a "Wishbomb" Shape:

Making and Using Custom Grids for Design Layout:

I find that making your own base layer grid and then saving it as a shape to re-use can greatly help line things up a bit more precise.

Note: After making the next two video's, I felt that making a video specifically for Grids would be a good idea. The next video semi-introduces making a grid as well.

Make a Grid to Create a Consistent Geometric Pattern (then delete the grid):

Re-Use the Grid in a Circle Zentangle Pattern:

I want to show you how to now reuse the grid shape you should have created if you'd followed the last video (above) and to develop a new pattern form with the grid as a guide.

Examples & Inspiration: Grid-Based Designs:

Now let's Create A Vine:

Never used Seamless Lite Before? Get up to speed!

Just a reminder, if you have no idea what I am doing in some of these area's of using Seamless Lite, you can watch the video introduction on this at your leisure HERE. This covers a complete anatomy of the web application itself and is a more in-depth tutorial with voice-over (not a high-speed musical).

Tie-Dye, a modern textile craft, is something that has been around for ages and will be around for many more moons to come. Always intriguing, always a new spin off the same basic concept, done in a rainbow of hues to monochromatic intrigues. And while we're on the topic, check out the Rainbow Contest over at Instrucables right now (awesome art prizes). All types of submissions are acceptable, so have some fun with it!

Tie-Dye became popular in the United States of our more modern world in the late 1960's and heavily saturated the 1970's which sort of branded it to the times and people of "Free Love", tripping on Acid and LSD.

"Although shibori and batik techniques were used occasionally in Western fashion before the 1960s, modern psychedelic tie-dying did not become a fad until the late 1960s following the example set by rock stars such as Janis Joplin and John Sebastian (who did his own dyeing)." ~ Wikipedia

Tie-Dye mostly went in to hiding with the outrageously new Neon trends during the 80's and 90's. Then, along with every popular known trend of each era, it was brought back and re-hashed in our Pop Culture of today's fashion sphere.

So how did it literally become an American craft to be readily found in stores everywhere - I love this part. Basically, Tie-Dye came about when a company was trying to save it's brand. RIT® dye, at the time was losing momentum with their prime market clientele, older generation females doing home-dying.

"Artists, opinion leaders, and influencers took to tie-dying almost as if it were a new psychedelic substance. Janis Joplin began wearing tie dye (it was even rumored she wore tie-dye panties) but it was still confined to a small circle of users. The next stop was the fashion industry but they weren't convinced it was anything more then a local fad. About this time, folks heard about a musical gathering that was to take place in rural Woodstock, New York, and it was going to be a big event (understatement of the decade!). Two of the well-known artists in the Village wanted to tie-dye several hundred T-shirts and give them away at the concert. RIT financed the project. Thousands of people showed up at Woodstock from across the country and the tie-dye T-shirts were eye-catching. The idea caught on…big. Joe Cocker, Mama Cass, Janis Joplin all wore tie-dye. Tie-dye became a symbol of antiestablishmentarianism, as no one else could have the same shirt as you even if they used the same colors. It was a statement of being an individual." - Read More... How the Fashion Industry finally took it seriously...

I could quite literally quote this entire article it's so interesting and well written. I'll leave the quotes to that, but how amazing to see how a pretty modern fad became a huge trend over trying to save a brand name product.

In summary, basically the traditional methods, techniques and practices of the tie-dye movement from the 1960's and 70's we know of here in the USA were brought over from African traditional art to save a brand name. Amazing!

Explore Tie-Dye on COLOURlovers:

Disney•Pixar has outdone themselves (again) in their latest colorfully animated movie, Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter (who also produced UP and Monster’s Inc.) and coming to the big screen on June 19th! The basis of the storyline develops a genuine visual of feelings portrayed in five specific colors that correlate in to emotions.

In leu of this extremely colorful production being explicitly about color in connection with feelings, we felt it appropriate to dig in to the collections COLOURlovers have in color.

Image Palette Sources:

Much of the community here on COLOURlovers relate their communication of feelings in to colors both as a single color name or in palettes that speak either by the palette name itself and/or a message within the colors used to create the palette. Palettes can be defined of anything regarding 2 to 5 colors grouped together.

Meet the Emotions!

For your entertainment, I love these video clips put together putting the actor-voices to the animated characters.

Disgust:

Fear:

Anger:

Sadness:

Joy:

Learn Basics: How to Create a Color Palette From an Image using PHOTOCOPA

I threw together an under 2-minute quick-guide video to the theme music of Inside Out.

Here's Your Color Challenge! Post YOUR Emotional Colors:

What's your color coordinated emotional palette and why?

Jump in to the COLOURlovers Emotional Colors!

Today's the day! Announcing the eight (8) winners of the #PixlrPop Contest plus the top five (5) most faved designs by the community. The judging panel consisted of the Pixlr Design Team and the COLOURlovers staff members (aka myself, Molly and Colin).

Absolutely fantastic entries! Great work everyone! The flow of commentary throughout the contest days coming from the Pixlr Design Team was exciting to see. They expressed how amazed they were with the talent we have here at COLOURlovers. I felt a glow of pride knowing we have this secret gold mine of talented people in our community.

I can't wait to showcase the final design inspirations near the end of June (coming up!) used within Pixlr Express!

Okay, okay I know you guys are chomping at the bit to see the winners! With each winner the judging panel as a whole put together some commentary on the aspects of each design.

"An excellent spin on stripes giving off a soft, feathery feeling. The pleasant mix of hues bleed together in to a lovely muted visual. All of which might work nicely in an overlay."

As you can see from the LOVES on each of these, none were selected by popularity (CL community vote). The judges took each day of submissions individually and considered many character traits of each piece as a whole to consider toward the design aspects of Pixlr Express. We will be showcasing the final pieces near the end of June (2015) when the COLOURlovers Expansion Pack becomes available to everyone using Pixlr! Exciting!

Top Five Loved Submissions: Sponsorship Winners!

As promised, we wanted to add a little fun kick to those who just can't help but produce tantalizing designs that makes everyones mouse-fingers want to go click-click-click on that LOVE button! So popular vote or not, that's what these are for.... being popular. The LOVE-COUNT displayed is only for the duration of the contest timeline, as some have changed since Tuesday.

That's it! I hope you all enjoyed the experience of this contest and can take positive things away even if you did not win. Trust me, there were a lot of difficult decisions in choosing!

Personally, I feel that contests push me to a different level of motivation in my own skills which contributes to how I view where I am in my skill much longer after a contest is held. I notice area's where I could probably work harder or think directionally different and garner some personal advice from the designs that did win. We quite literally could have chosen over a thousand designs we loved, but in the case of contest critique, it comes down to a hard line.

Claiming Your Prize!

Grab Bag Winners: You will be receiving either a Love Note and/or an email (whatever email is associated with your COLOURlovers member account). In this message you will get links to all the Grab Bag Items we had pictured and linked here in the contest post. Messages will go out today at some point, you will be given a certain time period to make your choice (feel free to reference the original contest page to start shopping early!). Colin will be handling prize notification and placing your order/choice.

Sponsorship Winners: Today we will activate the new or upgraded Sponsorship to your COLOURlovers Member Account. If you already have a paid sponsorship active, we will simply add an additional year to your current expiration date.

Seamless Lite at COLOURlovers is something many people shy away from, but hopefully after some inspiring short video clips, most of you will start to gain some perspective on how to get a design you're proud of. Check out our YouTube Channel!

While the bulk of the video's I've been preparing are centered around using Seamless Lite, there are the intro video's to palette making and I will add more fun abstract videos weekly.

After my 8-minute intro video regarding more details on the Line Tool itself, I have added a collection of video's in high-speed of certain design styles to show you the process. You will hopefully learn how to layer for dimension and layering to create visual tricks. Overall just using what we have available in Seamless Lite is not as limiting or as complicated as you might think.

I want to point out some further resources that I personally tend to lean on for getting inspiration on what to draw exactly. I find if I just plop myself in front of Seamless Lite I feel vacant and suddenly all those idea's I had are not there and I draw a blank. Viable search terms include:Quilt block design (key to put "quilt block"), embroidery patterns (be sure to include the "patterns" part of this search as you'll get step by step instructions) and then, Zentangle Patternsand/or Zentangle Tutorialsto get you more specific guides.

Look at each topic matter and you'll start to notice a design style you like. If you love geometric bold patterns, Quilt Block Designs are your go-to. If you love the organic artistic design style, both Embroidery and Zentangle are a great start.

A Detailed Look at the Line Tool:

Making Leaf & Stem (with leaves):

High Speed Pattern Design (start to finish):

Folk Art Shape-Building & Pattern Layout

The biggest thing I want to emphasize in this video is the process of wisely using your time. If you're like me and you don't have 8-hours to sit around making a pattern, split up your time by developing core Custom Shapes and design elements then later coming back to work on your design layout. You'll thank me later when you can easily go in to your shape library with a fresh frame of mind when it comes to the pattern layouts.

Adding Emphasis to Shapes

I hope you enjoy the quick bits to music. They are much faster to watch as patterns come together. I hope it's helpful!

Inspiring Templates Made in Seamless Lite:

Pixlr Express is making a COLOURlovers Expansion Pack! This is going to be a such a fun and unique contest open for all talent-types utilizing our very own familiar tools. If you're crazy impatient and want to skip further reading, go here to submit designs right away!

You will be creating using:

More in-depth resources:

So what's in it for you?

If your design is chosen (aka you win), it will be used to inspire the Pixlr Design Team's choices in the development of the COLOURlovers Expansion Pack as a photo overlay, border, or sticker. These are design elements used throughout Pixlr apps, but more specifically you'll get to see them available on Pixlr Express (for free!). Pretty exciting!

Eight (8) Winners! Check out how the winners-scale works!

This is something more unique to the COLOURlovers contests. I personally love the concept Colin has put together because it allows more overall opportunity.

* Each day a winner will be selected (behind the scenes by Pixlr & the CL Team)

* Be sure to submit and keep submitting each day (as many times as possible!). You must submit content each day to be re-considered for that day. I highly suggest, making fresh designs for each new day. CONTEST SUBMISSION PAGE (again!)

This means each day of the contest is an opportunity to win something (you can only win once throughout the entire contest). It will not matter what time of each day you post, between 12:01am to 11:59pm PST (with the exception of the start and end dates) because the submissions will be randomized in a filtered gallery for the judges panel.

gmt to pst&lt;a href="http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/gmt-to-pst-converter"&gt;gmt to pst&lt;/a&gt;

Community LOVES will still be available on submissions, however this filter is not displayed to the judges at choosing time, nor will it affect decisions in the slightest. We did want to do something fun with the community loves so we'll be giving five (5) Sponsorship 1-year level-up or extensions to COLOURlovers members design submissions with the most Loves. *You may only win once in this category.

Prize Grab Bag!

The prizes are a non-branded gift this time around. Each winner will get to select from our grab bag of fun prizes! Colin has rounded up all sorts of crazy fun prizes that any human should find fun to choose from. Winners will have a set timeframe to choose their prize after winners are announced so that we can ship them all out at once so make sure you are checking your email and will be available post-contest.

Rules & Details

Only patterns that you have both designed and colored can be entered into the contest. You may enter as many times as you like each day! Submissions from the previous day will not roll over in to the following day, so make sure you are submitting a fresh set each day.

Submissions open from May 19th at 9am PST and close on May 26th at 5pm PST.

One winner will be chosen each day by a panel of judges at Pixlr.com and COLOURlovers.com employees (Pixlr Design Team Members and Colin & Molly).

The magic of palette design here on COLOURlovers has been a mystery to some for far too long. While many of you have figured it out beyond the Basic Palette Maker, some of you have taken a glance at COPASO or PHOTOCOPA and run for the hills. I promise, they aren't that difficult to master!

While both COPASO and PHOTOCOPA are excellent for more complex palette making, understanding the difference between the two and knowing when to use what, will definitely change the way you go about making palettes.

When I first saw these two palette making tools, I thought to myself, "gee, they seem a bit redundant. I can load an image in to both, I can pick colors from an image in both and I can do varied widths in both..... so what's the difference?!"Well I'll tell you, there is a whole lot of difference between the two!

I don't know about you, but I see many images floating around in the physical world as well as the digital world, that simply inspire me and I want to keep the reflection of those hues in the compartment of my brain where I keep inspiration.

If an image has, let's say, sparked inspiration to create a palette, but not in the literal sense, then hop right over to COPASO. Why? Because it's a total workspace to get your thoughts out and track the process. Altering and perfecting color variations and holding possibilities in the sidelines, is what COPASO does best. From multiple images, personal note-taking, a scratch-pad, in-site search ranges and a slew of color theory mixing tools you really cannot go wrong.

However, there are particular needs to create palettes in direct relationship with an image this is PHOTOCOPA's strong suite. For example, I have written a number of blog posts recently, that are primary examples of when to use PHOTOCOPA. My Avengers 2 blog post, refers to quite a variety of palettes related to the hero's. Not all the palettes I list, were created using PHOTOCOPA, but they probably should have been, keep that in mind.

Here is a perfect example: when I searched COLOURlovers for my post about the Game of Thrones and color palettes in reference to the shows characters, most of the palettes I saw don't visually match how I see the character in my memory.

But a lightbulb goes on when I look at this palette titled, "Sansa Stark" (by haute1couture). Why is this?

There is a reason, the word "PHOTO" is found in the name, PHOTOCOPA. If you're wanting to quite literally choose exact colors from an image or photo, you'll most certainly want to utilize the featured tools of PHOTOCOPA.

Furthermore, when you use PHOTOCOPA and load an image in to it yourself, your image is available to anyone else using PHOTOCOPA to create palettes from. You will see in the example (above screenshot) of Sansa Stark, two palettes were made from the member who loaded the image in (haute1couture), but another one was made by a different member (image source link to screenshot page).

You can see different palettes made with the images by clicking on the image on the Palette Profile Page, give it a try!

Without making you wait even longer, here is the video covering the differences between the two amazing web-apps as well as an in depth look at the specific features of each.

Watch this VIDEO: Advanced Palette Making on COLOURlovers using COPASO & PHOTOCOPA

Much of the video covers the specific tools in COPASO and their relation and usage to Color Theory. The length is considerably due to going in to much of the details of each COPASO and then PHOTOCOPA.

The Sponsorship feature on COLOURlovers has been around for quite some time, however, over the past year and a half with the transition of company ownership, the Sponsorship feature lapsed and broke. Because there was no staff available technically managing some of the back-end things on the site faltered. It is now fixed!

If you want to skip the video, simply navigate through your profile page, to your account page menu's, and edit your sponsorship. Follow this path:

Go to: Your Account > Sponsorship > Renew / Gift / Update Sponsorship

Please feel free to Love Note me if you continue to have issues with this. :)

The world of comics has always been full of a dramatic array of colors! Notice over time how the color schemes used to be quite bright on spandex outfits, where the more pop culture hero series have taken them to a darker shade with added grit, grime and texture.

Comic characters initially started coming out in relevance to war going on and highly impacting families everywhere. The colors really inflect that super hero's were a pop of energy with added illustrative detail. When comic book characters first started making appearances, the color schemes in every day life were not popping off clothes and accessories, things were more dull and less dramatic.

Jump forward to today. We've got Neon trends everywhere (Keeping Up With Fashion Trends Neon + more neon). There is no lack of color in our every day lives. War to us is not a traumatic thing in the majority of the population unless you are directly connected to it within family or close friends. There is no draft, forcing fathers and brothers in to war. People today want, rough and rugged characters focused more on their personalities and war abilities than, their colors popping off the big screen. It's quite interesting to see that flow of change through time. Enjoy the graphic!